Tina Brown, one of the most distinguished magazine editors of her generation who blazed a trail through the media capitals of London and New York, yesterday embarked on her latest venture: to test her legendary skills in the printed medium in the anarchic environment of cyberspace.

Brown unveiled her new offering, the Daily Beast, with a launch devoid of fanfare. The website is her first venture into internet publishing and will be followed closely by media watchers curious to see how the former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will fare.

The site has a clean and elegant design that is Brown's hallmark, aided by the fact that it is as yet uncluttered by online advertising. It is positioned somewhere in the middle of news websites Drudge and the Huffington Post, both in terms of content and politics.

It has more original content than Drudge though less than the Post. But like Drudge it also acts as an aggregator, linking to stories of the day as chosen by its small team of editors under its motto "Read this, skip that".

Politically, it seeks a non-partisan tone, in contrast to the spiky, rightist edge of Drudge and the unashamed liberalism of the Post. Its contributors span the spectrum, from the architect of the conservative revolution, Newt Gingrich, to Bill Clinton who makes an appearance on launch day with his selection of books on the financial crisis.

Brown has much riding on the fate of the Daily Beast. Financially, it will have a fraction of the running costs of her last big foray into publishing, Talk magazine - and those will be born by media executive Barry Diller's group InterActiveCorp, of which the website forms a part. But the collapse of Talk in 2002 dented her reputation as an editor with the golden touch, and this may be her chance to regain it.

Sree Sreenivasan, professor of new media at Columbia Journalism School, believes her chances of success are good. "People are finding it hard to keep up amid the explosion of news and information and they're looking for ways to cut through the clutter like this."

The name of the site is drawn from Brown's favourite novel, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, about the excesses of Fleet Street newspapers; a curious allusion for a start-up with no formal links to the old print medium.

But then she is self-deprecating about her own lack of knowledge about the web, confessing on the site that she is a "real dinosaur" who was born in an era when the smallest computer was the size of a subway car. But then she also protests: "I'm not completely sure how a printing press works, but that never stopped me."

She is also seeking to meet head-on suggestions that her site is a pale imitation of Arianna Huffington's hugely successful site, denying that she is jealous of her rival and calling her a "very old friend".

Huffington repaid the compliment, saying: "I'm very glad to see her diving into the internet. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion and entertainment online and that's good for all of us."